Wednesday, September 20, 2006

"QUIGO: THE NEXT GOOGLE?"

A good article in CNNMoney.com on one of GoingOn Network's technology partners, Quigo. They are powering the text-based ads within our platform. Some of our pages already have these in place and this will go system wide within the week.

Quigo is not the household name that these other two search giants are. But the privately held company, which competes with Google (Charts) and Yahoo (Charts) in a key part of the online advertising business, is quietly becoming a bigger player.

Quigo sells a product called AdSonar to online publishers. AdSonar, like Google's AdSense and Yahoo's Content Match, combs through Web pages and serves up relevant ads based on the text on the page.

CNN.com and CNNMoney.com, for example, use Yahoo's Content Match on their sites and many other online media firms use either Content Match or AdSense. (Time Warner (Charts) owns CNN.com and CNNMoney.com.)

But a growing number of companies are beginning to favor AdSonar. In July, Cox Newspapers, which owns 17 daily newspapers, including The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Austin American-Statesman, said it would begin using AdSonar.

And earlier this month, Quigo scored a big victory when ESPN.com announced that it would begin using AdSonar this fall. The popular sports news site had been using Yahoo's Content Match. Other sites that use AdSonar are USAToday.com, News Corp.'s (Charts) FoxNews.com and MarthaStewart.com.

How is such a small company able to compete against the Internet's two established search titans? (full article)